While data security has always been one of the top CEOs concerns for the past decade or so, more compliance regulation has been hitting organizations doors every year. After organizations have mastered how to secure their physical environment by using physical segregation, Virtualization came around and changed the security game. Now organizations has to ensure that their Virtual Infrastructures are meeting compliance regulations such as PCI, HIPAA, SOX, and FISMA. Trying to manually keep up with such regulations that get updated regularly can be an endless hassle, & that why VMware has released vCenter Configuration Manager few years back.

vCenter Configuration Manager can help organizations not only audit their virtual infrastructure against compliance regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), Payment Card Industry (PCI), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and Federal information Security Act (FISMA), but as well it help you audit your environment against vSphere best practices including vSphere Security best practices. vCenter Configuration Manager can even help you re-mediate your environment to ensure it is meeting such regulation where many of those remediation can be carried out automatically others will include the recommendations on how to fix it. vCenter Configuration Manager is not limited to the vSphere Infrastructure, but it can check physical machines, Windows/Linux/Unix OS, & even applications for such compliance. For those smaller environments where they can not afford the great vCenter Configuration Manager, VMware has not forgot about you. VMware has released quite few VMware vSphere Free Compliance Checkers that can help you audit your environment for free. Below is the list and explanations of available checkers.

• VMware HIPAA Compliance Checker for Windows

This is a free tool to assess compliance on Windows machines on which you are managing health information to determine whether they meet the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) standards.

• VMware HIPAA Compliance Checker for Linux

This is a free tool to assess compliance on Linux machines on which you are managing health information to determine whether they meet the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) standards.

• vSphere 5.0 VMware Hardening Guidelines Checker

The Compliance Checker runs an assessment on ESX/ESXi hosts managed by vCenter Server. The assessment is based on a predefined subset of the vSphere 5.0 Hardening Guide rules and is run against the first 5 ESX/ESXi hosts found on the target vCenter Server.

This Sphere 5.0 VMware Hardening Guidelines Checker is a robust utility providing detailed compliance checks  against the VMware vSphere Hardening Guidelines. Unlike other free  tools in the market, Compliance Checker for vSphere is a fully  functional product. For example, you can print the reports that  Compliance Checker produces, and can run compliance checks across  multiple ESX and ESXi servers at once.

VMware Compliance Checker for vSphere lets you:

• Check compliance for multiple VMware ESX and ESXi servers concurrently. Run compliance check on up to 5 ESX or ESXi servers at a time and produce reports.
• Supports VMware vSphere hardening guidelines. Perform checks on VMware ESX and ESXi servers to conform with the latest VMware vSphere hardening guidelines.
• Analyze compliance assessment results. After a compliance run, you can view the assessments by ESX/ESXi hosts, plus guests.
• Save and Print assessment results. You can save and print the compliance assessment reports to your team for review and they can be saved for archival needs.

Note this version is still not compatible with vSphere 5.1, but a new version should be out soon.

 

• vSphere 4.1 VMware Hardening Guidelines Checker

The Compliance Checker runs an assessment on ESX/ESXi hosts managed by vCenter Server. The assessment is based on a predefined subset of the vSphere 4.1 Hardening Guide rules and is run against the first 5 ESX/ESXi hosts found on the target vCenter Server.

• vSphere 4.0 VMware Hardening Guidelines Checker

Compliance Checker for VMware vSphere 4.0

• VMware PCI Compliance Checker for Windows

VMware PCI 2.0 Compliance Checker for Windows .msi. Run installer on a Microsoft Windows machine then use to scan up to 5 Microsoft Windows servers and/or desktops against PCI DSS v2.0 requirements.

• VMware PCI Compliance Checker For Linux

VMware PCI 2.0 Compliance Checker for Linux .msi. Run installer on a Microsoft Windows machine then use to scan up to 5 Red Hat Linux servers and/or desktops against PCI DSS v2.0 requirements.

You can download any of these tools for free by visiting: https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/evalcenter?p=compliance-chk

You will need to login with your VMware user account to be able to download these tools. You always can create a free account if you don’t have one yet.

I decided to share this info with my readers as it seems many admins are still not aware of such tools availability. Hope these tools help all of you meeting your compliance requirements & would love to hear your feedback on these tools in the comments area below.